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Scoutingdale Gundogs

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Scoutingdale Gundogs

Following our own gundogs through training, retrieves, handling & days in the field.

Scoutingdale Gundogs | Working & Training Gundogs | Midlands

Will Gray uses positive reinforcement to develop gundogs for working tests, shoots & everyday reliability.

09/11/2026

Nothing better than a day out in the countryside!

05/11/2026

A little handling exercise with Ruby.

I deliberately sent her away from where I’d placed a blind retrieve, with the aim of using the stop whistle and directional casts to guide her onto it.

Three stops, a few changes of direction and eventually onto the dummy.

The retrieve was only around 80 - 100 yards, but I wasn’t interested in the distance. I wanted to see how well she’d respond to the whistle and trust my directions, even though she had no idea where the dummy was.

Really pleased with how she handled this one!

04/11/2026

Are we Chasing Distance before Quality?

In working tests, trials and out in the shooting field, a retrieve could be 50 yards or it could be 200 yards.

But regardless of the distance, surely what we’re looking for at the start is much the same?

A dog that’s set up correctly, looking in the right direction and confident enough to take a nice straight line when sent.

And ideally, once it’s made the retrieve, coming straight back along that same line.

Point A to point B and back to point A.

I sometimes wonder whether we get a little too caught up in how far our dogs can retrieve, rather than how consistently they can produce a good retrieve in the first place.

After all, if we concentrate on getting that setup, confidence and straight line consistently right at shorter distances, surely distance should become a natural progression?

Of course, not every retrieve goes to plan. There will always be times when we need to handle our dogs or let them use their noses to work things out.

But perhaps before asking whether our dog can do a 200-yard retrieve, we should be asking how consistently it can do a really good 50-yard one.

Distance matters, but surely the quality of the retrieve matters more than the number of yards?

02/11/2026

ARE WE TOO QUICK TO HELP OUR DOGS?

Sometimes I think we’re too quick to reach for the whistle.

A dog goes slightly off line on a retrieve, and we’re straight on the whistle.

They struggle to find a dummy, and we’re tempted to give them another bit of direction.

But what if we’d just given them another few seconds?

Would they have worked it out for themselves?

I wonder if, by constantly stepping in, we sometimes take away the opportunity for our dogs to problem-solve and build confidence in their own abilities.

Of course, there’s a balance to be had. We want dogs that can think for themselves and use their initiative, but we don’t want them going self-employed and deciding they know better than us either! 😂

They still need to be responsive to our cues and willing to take direction when needed.

In these photos, I’d given the hunt whistle and then left her to get on with it. She knew what she was looking for, so rather than keep interfering, I gave her the time to work it out.

Sometimes our dogs aren’t actually struggling. They’re just taking a little longer than we’d like!

And of course, sometimes they genuinely do need our help. We don’t want them repeatedly getting things wrong or losing confidence.

But perhaps knowing when NOT to intervene is just as important as knowing when to help.

It’s certainly something I’m trying to be more conscious of in my own training.

What do you think? Are we sometimes too quick to reach for the whistle?

30/10/2026

Patiently waiting while we set today’s exercise up!!
(hurry up dad)

29/10/2026

Debs running Chili, straight line & listening to the whistle!!

28/10/2026

ARE WE CONDITIONING OUR GUNDOGS ENOUGH?

Sometimes I think we’re guilty of expecting reliability far too quickly in dog training.

We teach something new.
The dog gets it right 5 or 10 times.
We think, “Brilliant, they know it!”

And then we start making things harder.

But there’s a big difference between a dog understanding what we’re asking and being conditioned to respond reliably.

And I wonder if we underestimate just how much repetition that takes?

Not just doing the same exercise over and over in the same field, but repeating it at different distances, in different places and eventually around more distractions.

We’re talking potentially hundreds of successful repetitions, gradually building a response that becomes more and more reliable.

It’s probably the least exciting part of gundog training, and perhaps the part we’re most tempted to rush.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.

Take a handling cue, for example. Your dog might take a left perfectly every time at 20 yards in a familiar field.

But will they take that same direction at 80 yards, in unfamiliar ground, with cover, obstacles or distractions?

If they don’t, is it because they don’t understand the cue, or because we haven’t done enough conditioning to expect that response in those circumstances?

Perhaps sometimes it’s not that our dogs need teaching again. It’s that we haven’t done enough repetition of what we’ve already taught them.

Something that really got me thinking while reading Oliver Kiraly’s book The Balance.

I’d be interested to hear what others think. Are we sometimes too quick to challenge our dogs before we’ve properly conditioned what we’ve taught them?

26/10/2026

Ruby doesn’t do slow starts! 😂💨

25/10/2026

Always working on straight lines and sitting steady until released.

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